The Five-Alarm Fire No One Is Talking About

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Trump has just done something breathtakingly reckless: he plunged the United States into direct conflict with Iran — a country the State Department designates as a state sponsor of terrorism — without doing the basic, unglamorous, absolutely essential homework of protecting Americans at home from retaliation.

Iran’s regime may be weakened and its leadership decapitated but it has long embedded terrorist assets and proxy networks across the Middle East and the wider world. Counterterrorism analysts have warned that Iranian operatives, criminal surrogates, or terrorist proxies could attempt attacks inside the United States and the West, even at this calamitous time for the Islamic Republic. Iran’s global terrorism footprint is not limited to proxies alone. Its covert units work with other terrorist groups to facilitate operations and logistics across continents. Its networks are involved in smuggling components, financing, and operational support in Europe and beyond. This extensive proxy and clandestine infrastructure means that, even if Iran’s conventional forces are degraded, its ability to threaten Western targets via embedded terrorist assets remains real.

Iran is not a minor regional irritant. It has spent decades building asymmetric capabilities through proxy militias, covert networks, and intelligence operations. It is unclear how much those networks have degraded over the past several days but since this strike did not come as a surprise to the Iranian regime, it stands to reason that its leaders had put contingencies for vengeance in place even in the event of their deaths. That is why Iran continues to bombard American allies with missiles across the Middle East now and why it is not unreasonable to believe that it may launch terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.

That is precisely why any president who chooses to escalate militarily against Tehran has an absolute obligation to ensure that counterterrorism and counterintelligence defenses at home are fully staffed, politically insulated, and operating at maximum capacity.

https://saltypolitics.substack.com/p/the-five-alarm-fire-no-one-is-talking